Adam Nevill - Banquet for the Damned

Darkness, unrelenting and impenetrable, presses against him. His stomach sick through, he turns his torch beam upward and calls out for Tom. It is like striking a waterproof match at the bottom of the deepest sea. But this world without light comes alive around him — seething and jostling, as if every molecule is animate with unnatural energy, threatening to douse him and his feeble light at any moment. Seeing no further than a few feet in either direction, he opens a door.

In here, her smell is strong. There is a dresser and some shelves. In the mirror of the dresser, before the cushioned stool she must sit on, he almost expects to see her face, with all its beauty and confusion and cruelty, looking back at him. Something seizes up inside his chest as he looks at the flickering glass. He turns away from it and swallows. Across the floor are strewn the clothes of a missing girl. Unwashed underwear tangled around sweaters and skirts. An odd shoe, dirty with stains, lies against a broken tape recorder. The bed is sunk into the wall, its furthest edges lost in the dark walls. The impression of a resting head indents one of the pillows. By a bedside table, strewn with sheets of sky-blue writing paper and make-up, is a leather jacket. Its red lining faces outward. It is Tom's biker jacket, with 'Sister Morphine' painted carefully above one elbow in silver paint.

Dante falls to his knees and holds it in his hands. His breath comes fast and turns to condensation about his face. Desperate, he looks about the floor and knocks things over, wanting more, hoping to reassemble his friend from fragments so Tom will stand up before his eyes, smiling. But then he finds it, as his clumsy body bangs against the dresser in his desperate search. Stretched across the top of the dark chest-of-drawers, beneath the mirror and between two bowls, and now looking like some rag in an antique shop that was once thought valuable, or a poacher's quarry left in a glass jar above a bar in a public house full of dust and faded paintings of horsemen hunting in red coats. The way it lies, the shine eerily present as if each strand is still attached to the scalp, makes him think of a horse's tail, used to switch flies. But where the long silky plume of hair begins, it is still wet from the head from which it has been torn.

Staggering back, a great sob fills him. He wants to cry and be sick and sit down from the shock all at the same time. His whimpers are strange to his own ears. In the dark, they sound rough and hard, the crying of a man grown and brought down in the world like a boy before a bully. 'Tom!' he calls, at the top of his voice this time, making the violence in his voice cover the panic that wants to stutter from his throat, from deep down where all the screams and the prayers are ready.

He runs from the room and the thin white beam shoots out from his torch and strikes walls that may have faces in them, and it flashes over doors that appear open, and then cornices from another age, and empty light sockets, rotten skirting boards, until finally it shines across the last flight of stairs he knows he must climb.

And he is not alone with his madness. Nothing speaks, nothing touches him, but something moves, behind him, before him, he even walks through it and feels a chill pass over his skin and into his body, slowing him, taking his strength away, suffocating him. And then someone speaks out there, above him perhaps. Words he can't understand. Mutterings from a low voice. And noises from a child or even a small animal, scuffling about up there, crying to itself.

From the stairs, which are short and cramped, he enters the attic, and the sounds are clearer, emerging, finding a centre, ahead of him. The penlight's beam flickers a few feet ahead before being swallowed again. Every hair sticks out from his neck and scalp. And the smell is worse in here than anywhere else he's been in the cottage; it is the stench of an occupant he silently prays is not home, for if it is he is finished.

Now Dante feels ready for death, going beyond terror, beyond flight, ready to deal blows against anything that moves as he falls. 'Who's there?' he hears himself shout. Invisible spittle leaves his mouth. Ahead of him now, the cries cease. 'Who's there?' he says. 'Tom? Mate? Tom?' He says it again and again until something smashes against his nose. Grunting, he falls with the knife held out. There is a sound of splintering wood, and the whimpering begins again. It takes him a moment to realise, as he heaves at the knife, stuck fast, that it is a wall he's just walked straight into, while holding the blade before him.

Something white skitters sideways across the floor, grazing the torch beam that flashes about in his free hand. Dante tugs the bent knife free, and then lets his ears follow the noises of the scrabbling thing until they settle in a corner of the attic, where the roof slopes down and vibrates with the sounds of someone panting.

Somehow he knows the eyes of this man creature that cowers in the dark are closed, because it expects the worst, and has done day after day in this terrible place. Maybe the light has gone out behind the closed eyes too. Maybe the mind is ready to close also, and the body is about to subside, to offer itself to the intruder. There is fear in the attic, not an enemy. 'Tom,' he says, in a voice thick with phlegm.

He flashes the torch at the corner where he knows the creature is huddled and now waits for its end. There it is: a bundle of pink sticks, gnarled and grey-headed, shrunken on the bare boards, unclean, tethered to a rope that cuts into its leg.

'Eliot,' Dante says to the ruin, the wretch.

Both hands are clutched across eyes that would consider blindness a mercy. The pale body, scarred in places, shivers. A shrivelled penis dangles between pointy hips. Messy grey hair hangs over the cage of hands on face, and through the middle and index fingers is the glint of an eye. 'Eliot,' Dante says, his voice no more than a rasp. Wide eyes retreat from the torch beam into a squint, burned by light. 'It's me, Dante,' he says, approaching the figure.

It is the man who betrayed him and Tom. Watched carefully by Eliot, he unzips his jacket and then offers it to the wretch on the piss stained planks. 'Put it on. Get up,' he says, surprised at the strength of his voice in the dark room. The battered jacket is taken by a frail hand and pulled around a red neck. 'Get up, damn you,' he says, sawing the leash from Eliot's ankle with the bottom of the knife blade, where it is still straight. 'My friend, Tom?' he asks, without faith, already knowing the answer.

Eliot's eyes dip. His body begins to shake, and he tries to sit down again from the crouch he's risen to.

'No,' Dante says, gripping him under the arm. 'Let's go,' he tells his hero, and drags him through the dark and then down the stairs.

Clinging to his arm like an old woman he once helped outside a shopping centre, Eliot shivers, his thin legs absurd beneath the leather jacket. 'You've done this,' Dante says, shaking. 'You brought this here.' His voice starts to tremble. 'You killed my friend.'

It is the middle of the night and Dante still watches him, the figure all hunched up on the couch in the dark, covered with a blanket from his feet to his neck. At least he's stopped shaking. It made Dante uncomfortable watching him in that state. After they climbed out of the Land Rover and went inside the flat it was the only thing that made him realise Eliot was conscious.

Outside, it has stopped raining, and if you listen carefully in the silence of the room you can hear the sea across the road, at the bottom of the cliffs.

Dante pours another two drinks, watching the whisky splash about in the bottom of the glasses. Eliot sucks in his breath. Without moving his head, Dante looks up. A voice comes from the figure under the tartan blanket. It sounds like he says, 'The American'. And then Eliot goes still under the blanket as if he has died. Dante wants him to repeat what he just said, but hasn't the strength to ask. Even the cold of early morning does not affect him. He can feel nothing. It is as if his head is a block of wood and nothing will ever move inside it again.